An Introduction to MATLAB for Geoscientists

David Heslop

https://earthsciences.anu.edu.au/people/academics/dr-david-heslop#acton-tabs-link--tabs-person_tabs-middle-1

Australian National University
Author Profile

Summary

This is an intensive 3-day course with no pre-requisites. It provides an introduction to MATLAB through interactive examples and hands-on problem solving. The course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of MATLAB so that they can begin to use it in their own research projects. MATLAB is intuitive for students who don't have programming experience. Therefore students can benefit greatly by choosing to use MATLAB in their own research.


Course Size:
15-30

Course Format:
Integrated lecture and lab

Institution Type:
University with graduate programs, including doctoral programs

Course Context:

The aim of this course is to provide postgraduate research students with an intensive introduction to MATLAB. This is an optional course for earth science postgraduates and no prior knowledge of MATLAB or programming is assumed.

Course Content:

This course provides an introduction to MATLAB for geoscientists. It is based on interactive examples and hands-on problem solving. The main aim of the course is to show the utility of MATLAB and to demonstrate to students how it can increase their research productivity.

Course Goals:

  • Students should be able to import and export data to and from MATLAB
  • Students should be able to perform numerical tasks in MATLAB
  • Students should be able to create their own MATLAB functions
  • Students should be able to produce high-quality MATLAB graphics

Course Features:

This course is an extended hands-on practical. The students take part in interactive examples and then apply their newly acquired knowledge to challenging problems. By solving these problems they gain an appreciation of how they will be able to utilize MATLAB in their own research.

Course Philosophy:

Given the nature of the course material, it is necessary to move away from lecture-style delivery and focus on practical exercises and problem solving. The majority of the students have a background working with Excel, therefore it is essential to show how MATLAB will benefit them and convince them that the time investment required to learn MATLAB is worthwhile.

Assessment:

There is no assessment for this course.

Syllabus:

Teaching Materials:

Course handout (Acrobat (PDF) 4MB Oct15 15)

References and Notes: